Women's movements

Few women have risen to the ranks of heads of state or government worldwide. The low numbers of female presidents and prime ministers in world history have left many untested assumptions about the impact of female leadership on the lives of fellow women. This article builds upon two bodies of work – studies of female […]

This article explores how women’s movements in China, India, and Indonesia have mobilised to influence processes of legal reform on violence against women and girls (VAWG). Legal change is a complex and iterative process, in which both state and non-state actors negotiate and bargain over the content of law in the ‘policy space’, bringing different […]

This article focuses on the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU): one of the oldest and largest machineries for women’s issues in the world. This article explores how this mass membership organisation in a socialist state is currently addressing the realities of women’s daily lives and gender relations in Vietnam. It considers the extent to which a […]

Commitment to gender mainstreaming has been expressed worldwide as a result of the Beijing conference in 1995. The introduction of gender mainstreaming in the Beijing Platform for Action was regarded as a victory for gender ambassadors from the South, including the women’s movements. However, an empirical study from Ghana on the processes of ‘translating’ gender […]